Best Form Builder for WordPress – Columns & Conditional Logic

Mar 13, 2019 | WordPress Wednesday

Kori Ashton shares her opinion on the best Form Builder in the WordPress community called WS Form. She gives 10 reasons why it beats the current industry leader. If you watch this channel you know that she loves Gravity Forms – but this one really could take its place in her heart!

Full Transcript

Hey you guys, my name is Kori Ashton, and welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. I’m excited today to share with you a new form builder introduced into the WordPress community only a few months ago. But I’m gonna give you 10 different reasons right now why I believe it’s going to be an industry leader very soon, and probably your choice for a form builder. Let’s go take a look at WS Forms.

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So WS Form has all the same robust features that you would find inside of an enterprise-level form builder for WordPress.

You can view all of the saved submission entries, so anybody who clicks submit on a form, you’re gonna be able to see an entire database of every time it’s ever been filled out, with all of the information that was ever submitted.

Conditional Logic, and I would even argue that this form builder actually has more advanced conditional logic than you’ve ever seen before, which means that if somebody does this on a field, then do that. You can have that If-then function and it’s an incredible, incredible feature that kinda, the sky’s the limit.

The more creative you can get with it, the more opportunity you have to really build out a dynamic user experience, not only for the visitor to the website, but also your admin team and how they send and receive information inside of a form.

E-Commerce capability, of course, you can build out easy shopping carts with this. You can have somebody register and pay a payment, that’s simple, those features are inside of here, it’s Gutenberg and Block ready.

It has autoresponders, again, with that conditional logic, so it’ll send out that automatic email, and it has a multi-step type form with those page breaks.

Those are standard features that you’re gonna find in any type of form builder that’s worth its weight in salt, plus, it is required, a payment as a premium plugin, but I’m gonna give you 10 other options of why WS Form goes beyond this.

Ability to Create Columns

The first one, and one of the things that frustrated me right away is the inability to make columns inside of other form builders. Well, inside of WS Form, you can do it just by dragging and dropping, and you can make columns. If you wanted something to be full-width, you’d just drag and drop it full width. It’s that easily done, that incredible. You can just make everything full width if you wanted to.

Every single field can be smaller, or larger, and it’ll automatically create the columns for you as you start to drag and drop things. If you don’t want the submit button to be full width, you literally just drag and drop it to whatever size you want it to be. You can even take entire sections and make them into columns just by dragging the entire section then.

If we wanted to duplicate this, let’s say you have a shipping and a billing section that you need, and you want it to be side-by-side, there you go, side-by-side, now you have your two different forms living there, beautifully, and of course, it’s responsive, so this would drop down below it, and speaking of responsive, that actually takes us to number two, which is device layouts, or media queries.

Device Layouts (Media Queries)

So, normally, you would have to write code in order to have the different breaks happen on the devices, but look down here as you see mobile, and then iPad, and laptop, and desktop, and then two different sized desktops. This is all going to adjust, allowing you to make changes on how your form layout appears per device. So on the cellphone, you want everything to be stacked beautifully, but then on that desktop version, you’ll want it to be side-by-side in columns.

You can make adjustments like this per device if you wanted to, simply by, again, by setting this range slider here to whatever device you want, and then manipulating how you want the form to appear in that specific device. I’ve never seen anything like that. That to me is just amazing.

Accessibility & WCAG Compliant

Accessibility and being WCAG compliant is definitely an issue that you need to address inside of all of your forms, and if you ever wanted to go in and just manually overwrite the label, they actually give you the ability to do that right down here. Every single field has a label area to go into and manually override it to be whatever you want it to be. By default, it’s gonna choose the label name that you type in there, and place it there, but you can easily override it.

Undo/Redo History

And I think it’s also incredible that they give us the ability to do redo and undo options, ’cause you know, if you’re ever playing around with a form builder, sometimes you can accidentally delete something that you don’t wanna delete, and you think to yourself, gosh, I’d really like to get back to that original version, especially as you’re previewing and testing.

Well, this area right up here allows you to just kind of click through and revert back. You can see the different steps here. There’s a tiny little number up there that tells you how many revisions they’ve actually saved during your session. You can also go over here to the undo area, and see by the time, and kind of play around with it, and reset it to the version that you like the best.

Locating Forms

When I was speaking to the WS Form guys, one of the features that I mentioned to them I thought would be really cool would be the ability to locate your form inside of your WordPress website, because one of the frustrating things is, when you’re building out a really advanced large website, you don’t remember where these forms live, so I thought it’d be pretty cool, well, I mentioned it to ’em, and the guys added it in there.

So it’s the locate option here, click there, and it’s gonna search your entire website, and it’ll tell you where this particular shortcode is being rendered. So this shows me that it’s inside of a post, and it’s also inside of a page. And you can click and go there and see exactly where that shortcode is. It will search, of course, Gutenberg blocks as well.

Import Forms

So what if you’ve already been using a different form builder, and you’d like to go ahead and switch over here to WS Form, but you’re thinking gosh, I really don’t wanna have to rebuild all these darn forms. I’ve got a lot going on. Well, they’ve thought of that too, they allow you to do a migrate.

So if you’ve ever built any of your forms, you can easily come in here and do an import from, it’ll ask you, you know, what field do you wanna pull in from. You can pull it in and it will dynamically rebuild the entire form, as well as pull-over the submissions and save them inside of here. So there’s no worry, you can easily come over here and convert to WS Form. They’ve thought of everything.

Another way that you can actually do an import is it will build out any form you need if you’re using one of these email services. So if you’re running a Mailchimp campaign, and it already knows what fields, it’ll automatically map those for you and create the form associated with what fields you’re trying to call over in Mailchimp.

Other Features

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Some of the other features that this offers are some really cool fields that I haven’t been able to find in a lot of the other form builders, and that’s of course the signature option where folks can actually sign using their mouse or their device to sign your form.

A rating option, where you can have stars, or basically, any custom icon you would want.

A range slider, so you can have somebody drag this range slider to get different values, a progress bar that it actually progresses as they’re filling out each required field, which is a really cool progression bar.

You have different custom buttons you can make inside the form, and a color picker field, so really cool, and totally different types of things that you can have in here. Some of these are gonna be inside of the PRO license, and some of these will be in the default.

Conversion tracking is gonna be another option. Now, this is inside of the PRO license and Agency license, right?

So you’re gonna be looking at being able to add Google Analytics tracking, Facebook tag tracking, basically any type of Javascript that you might need to fire off. You can do that inside of here. You can run Javascript actions inside of this type of form and be able to just monitor that from your dashboard, be able to track all of those analytics, whether it’s a conversion, whether it’s a view, a submission, whatever that trigger might be. So really a cool feature to have, and normally it would take a developer to get that option. This is already inside of here.

And if you’re a developer, you’re absolutely gonna be intrigued by the debug, the tools that are inside of this thing, it’s so robust, you can fire off any type of debugging issue that you might need to troubleshoot, and it’ll render it right away.

Conclusion

And finally, you know if you watch my channel, free is always in the budget. An amazing offering, these guys are giving WS Form, a free version, so you can get introduced to it, tinker and play with it, fall in love with it, and then you can easily upgrade into the PRO or the PRO Agency license even, so you can have unlimited installs across all of your websites, unlimited site licenses. Pretty impressive, right, you guys?

I can’t say enough about this incredible form builder, and every single week it seems like these guys are putting out brand new features, adding to the robust capabilities of this incredible plugin.

Hey, be sure to put links below if you’re using this plugin and you wanna showcase what forms you’re building with it.

I’d love to see those projects. And be sure to let the developers over at WS Form know that you’re using their product and you found ’em over on our channel. I hope to see you next time, I hope you have a great WordPress Wednesday. Bye y’all!